Conky is a system monitor software for the X Window System. It is available for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. It is free software released under the terms of the GPL license. Conky is able to monitor many system variables including CPU, memory, swap, disk space, temperature, top, upload, download, system messages, and much more. It is extremely configurable, however, the configuration can be a little hard to understand. Conky is a fork of torsmo.

Prevent flickering

Conky needs Double Buffer Extension (DBE) support from the X server to prevent flickering because it cannot update the window fast enough without it. It can be enabled in /etc/X11/xorg.conf with Load "dbe" line in Section "Module". The xorg.conf file has been replaced (1.8.x patch upwards) by /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d which contains the particular configuration files. DBE is loaded automatically.

# Place below the other options, not below TEXT or XY
double_buffer yes

Do not minimize on Show Desktop (Compiz)

If the 'Show Desktop' button or key-binding minimizes Conky along with all other windows, start the Compiz configuration settings manager, go to "General Options" and uncheck the "Hide Skip Taskbar Windows" option.

Integrate with KDesktop

Conky with screenshot configuration generate problems with icons visualization. So there are some steps to follow.

Display weather forecast

Display RSS feeds

Conky has the ability to display RSS feeds natively without the need for an outside script to run and output into Conky. For example, to display the titles of the ten most recent Planet Arch updates and refresh the feed every minute, you would put this into your ~/.conkyrc:

Display new emails (IMAP + SSL)

Conky has built in support for IMAP accounts but does not support SSL. This can be provided using this script from this forum post. This requires the Perl/CPAN Modules Mail::IMAPClient and IO::Socket::SSL which are in the perl-mail-imapclientAUR and perl-io-socket-ssl packages

Create a file named imap.pl in a location to be read by Conky. In this file, add (with the appropriate changes):

User-contributed configuration examples

Graysky

[Here] it is - modify to fit your system. Optimized for a quad core chip w/ several hdds (although one of them is not connected for this screenshot) and an nvidia graphics card. You can easily modify this to a dual or single core system with one or whatever number of hdds.

A note about symbolic fonts

Many of the more decorated .conkyrc's use the fonts PizzaDude Bullets and Pie Charts for Maps. They are available from the AUR as 'ttf-pizzadude-bullets' and 'ttf-piechartsformaps' respectively, or they can be found and downloaded with a quick search and manually installed using the instructions in Fonts.

Universal method to enable true transparency

Transparency is a strange beast in Conky, but there is a way to universally apply true transparency with any environment or window manager by using xcompmgr and transset-df. Install xcompmgr from [extra] and transset-df from [community] with pacman -S xcompmgr transset-df. These packages both have the same 3 dependencies, so this is the lightest method for composition available, for those of you using standalone window managers in order to achieve the leanest setup you can manage (or whatever reason you have :D)

NOTE: This may conflict with any other compositing manager you are already using.

Check xcompmgr documentation to help you decide which compositing options you would like to enable. The following is a common standard command.

xcompmgr -c -t-5 -l-5 -r4.2 -o.55 &

Make sure conky is running with conky &. Use transset-df to enable transparency on the Conky window. Set '.5' to any value in the range 0 - 1.

transset-df .5 -n Conky

This should give your conky window true transparency. If you get an error like,

$ transset-df .5 -n Conky

No Window matching Conky exists!

Verify that conky is running, and use xprop and click on the conky window to find the name you should pass to transset-df.

$ xprop | grep WM_NAME

WM_NAME(STRING) = "Conky (ArchitectLinux)"

In this case, "Conky" is right, but for you it may be different, so be sure to use your output instead. If ~/.conkyrc has own_window_type panel then this xprop invocation may show now output. Try using any of the following options instead. own_window_type {dock,normal,override,desktop}